Data Point of the Week: Are Local Advertisers Interested in AR & VR?

AR and VR will apply to lots of areas, both consumer and enterprise. But what about advertising? There’s an opportunity to bring a more immersive touch to advertising, such as checking out a new car. As we’ve examined, this will have to be done in native ways to be successful.

But what about local advertising specifically? We’re talking small businesses and big brands that target specific geographies. It’s a major category of advertising and is particularly conducive to AR, given its ability to qualify product info (a la Google Lens) or navigate inside stores (a la VPS).

Street Fight recently quantified advertisers’ interest in immersive tech and found, unsurprisingly, that interest is still somewhat low but promising. Among small business marketers, 18 percent are interested in AR & VR. Among larger brands, 12 percent indicated interest.

The relatively low interest again isn’t very surprising. But it is surprising that small businesses showed greater interest than brand marketers. Generally it’s the opposite: larger brands with dedicated marketing resources and greater budgets are more adoptive of emerging ad media.

Small businesses interest in AR & VR could be due to a competitive drive to gain an edge with emerging technology. In this case, things like AR can help them engage customers at the store level with AR graphics that provide things like product info, reviews, games and hidden deals.

As we’ve mentioned, this is going to require lots of supporting data to make sure that graphics and informational overlays are shown properly, and in the right places. That will require a mix of good object recognition, in combination with good geo-data for stores’ location and product details.

This will be a big opportunity to infuse AR with local offline commerce (which accounts for 88 percent of U.S. retail spending). Companies like Amazon and Ikea are using AR to drive e-commerce. But the larger play — in terms of sheer dollars — will be offline AR-assisted shopping.